Rust Safety and Distributed Consensus

Vytautas Astrauskas will delve deep into Rust safety verification, and Saulius Grigaitis will talk about distributed consensus.

Agenda:

• 18:45 - Say hello, grab some pizza or a drink
• 19:00 - Vytautas Astrauskas - Short intro to Rust
• 19:20 - Vytautas Astrauskas - How safe is Rust?
• 20:00 - Short break
• 20:15 - Saulius Grigaitis - Reaching Consensus in Distributed Systems

Thanks Trafi for hosting our event. The office is located at Rinktinės str. 5, Building C, 4th floor. Entrance from Rinktinės street. Once inside head right, use QR code (https://bit.ly/2W7qUM8) to get through the gate and go up to the 4th floor. Video: https://youtu.be/lcnXFxZosuM

Vytautas Astrauskas: Short intro to Rust, How safe is Rust?

When talking about safety, it is common to divide programming languages into languages that provide memory safety (Haskell, Scala, Java, Python) and the ones that do not (C and C++). As a language that is often positioned as a safe alternative to C and C++, Rust often is simply put into the first bucket of memory safe languages. In this talk, we will look into what are the problems when we try to go beyond simple memory safety and what Rust has to offer.

I am a PhD student at ETH Zurich interested in programming languages and program correctness. The goal of my research is to build a verifier that allows proving that Rust programs satisfy the desired properties.

Saulius Grigaitis: Reaching Consensus in Distributed Systems

Blockchains are probably the most hyped distributed systems. However, there are many types of distributed systems and most of them use some kind of consensus algorithm. Do you know that it is not possible to solve the consensus problem in a fully asynchronous setting with only one crash fault? In this presentation, we are going to discuss how the consensus problem is solved in a bounded setting and how Rust helps to build distributed systems.

I'm building Rust team here in Lithuania for a funded stealth mode DLT startup. Previously I was Head of Engineering for multiple successful startups for more than 12 years. I'm also a Partner Associate Professor at MIF VU where I'll deliver Blockchain development with Rust course next semester.